One day, a friend of mine was found murdered. She was a twenty-year-old junior at Kenyon. She'd finished work at a local bar and left with her tips. That's all anyone knew.

The Awful Truth

IN ONE OF THE LAST WEEKS OF MY senior year at Kenyon College, Emily Murray invited me to her apartment for tea. She had blazing red hair in wide, looping curls and swirls and almost arabesques, and it felt silken, and it smelled faintly of what she'd had for dinner. We drank the tea, and she rambled on about a church youth group she'd loved back in high school. She was small and sweet and came just up to my chin, and at some point in our conversation, I leaned in and kissed her. I felt her avian heart beat in her chest, felt her freckled skin against my own. Afterward, we talked some more, and then I left.

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A week later, when I was in my apartment with another woman, Emily knocked on my door. I shushed the other woman, we were very quiet, and Emily assumed I wasn't home and moved on.

I graduated in the spring of 2000, and then on November 3, Emily, still a student, disappeared. Thirty-six days later, Emily's body was found wrapped in a rug inside a trailer in Ray, Ohio, a slow ninety miles south of Kenyon's campus. There was a single bullet hole in the top of her head and an exit wound in her neck where the bullet had passed from her body, through the thin floor of the trailer, and into the slowly freezing southern Ohio ground.

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IT'S AROUND MIDNIGHT, the beginning of a muggy Independence Day in 1992 in Columbus, Ohio, and just north of East Main Street on Linwood Avenue, a fifteen-year-old kid has just shot a guy. Not ten minutes ago the kid was sitting on the porch of a row house at 329 Linwood with a guy named Darnell and Darnell's friend Shevelle. The kid said he was going to see his girlfriend and hopped on his bicycle. He'd been in town for only a couple of weeks--since his friend Rudy brought him here from Queens, gave him $1,000 worth of crack, and set him to work--but the kid was in trouble. Rudy's not the kind of guy you fuck over, and already the drugs were gone and there wasn't a cent left of the grand he owed. I only tell you once, either get down with the clique or get found in a ditch: The words played over in the kid's head.

He'd heard that this guy Mick, Shevelle's neighbor on Linwood Avenue, just got paid. Heard him tell Darnell he might be looking to hook up on a bag. So the kid rode to the end of the block and crouched in front of a rusted-out playground, obscured by an immense bush. He was a shadow of thick black dreadlocks, red bandanna, dark-black skin, five feet five. There was a gun in his hand, an Excam .22 with a wood-grain handle.

Then Mick came walking up the block, gone to get beer for Shevelle, and he barely made out the kid moving, heard him demand money. Nothin' in my pockets, Mick told him, turning them inside out. The kid told Mick, Go fuck yourself. He knew about Mick's paycheck, but Mick was not giving up his money. Mick turned back toward his house, then--pop--the kid shot him in the small of the back.

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Mick ran, and the kid was running, too, sweat in his eyes, gun slick in his hand, and he saw Mick run up the stairs to 329 Linwood, where Shevelle and Darnell were still standing. Mick stumbled up the four short steps of the house and--pop--the kid shot him again. Mick's body fell in the doorway of Shevelle's apartment. He got up and fell again, prostrate.

And now the kid is in the doorway, menacing over Mick. He calls in his low baritone to Shevelle and Darnell to get back; Shevelle's two children are with her, her baby daughter in her arms, bleary-eyed and confused. And the kid points the gun at them, motions them inside. Mick's groaning and clutching his stomach, rocking ever so slightly. And as the kid rifles through Mick's socks, taking the hundred dollars or so that's tucked into them, he looks and sees Shevelle and her two children cowering in the doorway, their eyes trained on him. He looks at them and sees one thing: fear.

This is Gregory McKnight the moment after his first murder.

AS ON MOST DAYS at a little before noon, Kimberly Zimmerman is driving to work from her house in Ray, Ohio. It's the first week of October 1997, and Greg McKnight is about to turn twenty-one, the age at which he will be released from juvenile detention at the Circleville Youth Center. Kim works in recreation at Circleville, overseeing the gym. She's about five feet six, her long black hair making it seem as if she's trying to look Native American. Kim's married--her husband is in prison on a drug charge--and at thirty-nine, she's almost twice the age of the juvies she works with.

Right around the same time Kim departs for Circleville, Greg leaves his room, strutting the grounds of the center unaccompanied, whereas others need direct supervision. In 1996, the Ohio Department of Youth Services' Circleville Youth Center was established as the home of the Cadre Youth Program, and Greg was one of the program's first participants. The program was designed to take juvenile felony offenders and attempt to rehabilitate them, in part by affording them privilege. It was to give them a shot at learning cooking from the kitchen staff, say, or office management from administrators, or even earning a scholarship to college. The facility looks much like a small elementary school--classrooms and a gym and a concrete courtyard--with the exception of the residences across the courtyard from the school, where the kids are divided into units of thirty or so, then into pods of about ten. The Cadre Youth make up a pod in the Ash unit.

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Greg came from a rough but stable background: grew up in Cambria Heights, in Queens, New York, a residential neighborhood just north of JFK Airport; lived with his mother and his brother until he started running with the wrong crowd; got in some trouble. Greg's mother sent him off to Texas to live with his godparents. Shortly after that, he was sent back to Queens before he took off for Columbus, where he was adjudicated "delinquent" as a juvenile offender for the aggravated murder of Mick Gilbert and committed to the custody of the state until he reached maturity.

So now Greg heads to the gym, where Kim has his lunch waiting. They greet each other with a hug. They hang out all afternoon, and at four or five, when the rec counselors have lunch, Kim brings Greg back takeout, and he sits with her in an office like one of the administrators.

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Like every other day, Kim and Greg remain together all afternoon, and she treats him as if he were her high school sweetheart: touching and flirting like a teenager. Months ago one of the juvie kids said something to Greg--Why the fuck do you get to sit around and do nothing all day?--and Greg was up in the kid's face: Hold me back, hold me back. Kim just looked on, starry-eyed. You should see Greg's temper, watch that boy, he's damn strong, she said.

By late afternoon, Kim's sister and housemate, Kathy Copley, comes down to join them. A corrections officer at the center, Kathy is thirty; she's wan, with scraggly jet-black hair reaching to her waist, amazon tall and wide, with a morbidly piercing stare. Coworkers talked about how she liked to show pictures of herself in lingerie when she first started working at Circleville. Months later, after an off-campus visiting day was held for the juvies and their families, Kathy brought back more photographs, this time of Greg, his brother, and his mother at her and Kim's house. This was obviously inappropriate contact with a youth under her care, and the other counselors had a hard time believing it.

Greg has had a litany of problems, most of them, it seems, connected to Kim or Kathy. One night earlier this year, Kim and Greg were locked in a classroom together and a staff member banged on the door until they opened up. Greg was sweaty, and Kim was stripped down to her tank top, her long hair stuck down the back of her shirt as if she'd just put it on. People were beyond suspicious, but the administration just gave Kim a warning.

Then one day several months ago, Greg was caught smoking pot in one of the classrooms to which Kim had a key, and one of the guards just couldn't take it anymore. He broke protocol and searched Greg's room, where the guard found Kim's cell phone, other contraband, and pictures of Greg with the sisters. A report was filed, and Kim and Kathy were investigated but managed to keep their jobs.

With Greg so close to freedom, no action was taken against him, either. On October 14, 1997, Greg is released. And soon after, the Cadre Youth Program ceases to exist.

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EMILY MURRAY WAS only a sophomore the night she invited me to her room, but I'd known her since her first few weeks at college, in 1998. Kenyon is a place where almost everyone you meet could end up a close friend--part of the beauty of a liberal-arts school of less than sixteen hundred students in Gambier, Ohio. Emily and her friends came daily to hang out in the pool hall where I worked; the college had a hand in most all of the businesses in Gambier--one exception being a restaurant called the Pirates' Cove, where Emily would eventually take a job.

When I would see Emily after that night we had tea, we spoke as if nothing had happened. But there was a new feeling between us--a friendship spawned by a relationship lost.

Emily grew up in Shaker Heights, Cleveland's most comfortable suburb. She was all of five feet four, fair skin and freckles, histrionic and excitable. Emily was smart, but in a mildly inaccessible way, a way you might not know by seeing her flighty facade. If you started her talking about everyday things, she would ramble with an edge of baby talk to her voice that some girls retain into their twenties, keeping them innocent, endearing, and vaguely distant. But if you got to talking about ideas, about how things should be, Emily would talk circles around you, suddenly outarguing, outreasoning, and outthinking you.

In the six months between the last time I saw her and her murder, Emily went through a difficult period. She became distraught over her breakup with her longtime boyfriend and was weighed down by the close quarters of a Kenyon winter, in which the ashen skies and dullness of January last well into April. She was not alone in that. Nothing compounds depression so acutely as seeing one's own unhappiness registered on the faces of others.

Then on May 6, 2000, Emily was hospitalized, having finished a long day of drinking and sunning herself by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol.

ALONG THE ROAD into Ray, Ohio, a string of trailers set at odd angles to one another rises haphazardly up the side of what seems more an embankment than a hill. The road winds for miles, and finally, on the right, is Clark Road. The first trailer you pass is surrounded by what must be twenty burned-out or wrecked cars on cinder blocks. Then the surface turns to dirt, and after a quarter mile up a steep incline, Kim and Kathy's driveway appears on the left, leading up to their house.

In late 1997, immediately after he's released, Greg moves in with Kathy and Kim. And shortly afterward, to the surprise of their colleagues at Circleville, Greg marries Kathy, not Kim--but then Kim's already married, and her husband, Kim Dale, is out of jail now. Kim and Kim--it's confusing enough that the neighbors call them Him Kim and Her Kim.

Him Kim, having served his sentence, is ready to walk right, and he wants Greg to walk with him. But he can't get Greg to pull his weight around the house. He asks Greg to take out the trash, and Greg won't do it. Asks him to mow the lawn, and Greg breaks the mower. Then there are Greg's fits: He can't control his temper, he puts his fist through the bathroom door, punches holes in the drywall, and Greg and Kathy's room is strewn with old clothes and trash.

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By late spring of 2000, almost three years after Greg moved in, Him Kim is finally fed up. He tells Kathy she needs to get her own place; she and Greg can get a trailer. Kathy gets some money to help from her mother, who lives up in central Ohio, on Met-o-wood Lane in Gambier, one of the few people in the village not affiliated with Kenyon College.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER her suicide attempt, doctors fear that Emily might need a liver transplant. But she recovers, and her parents take her home to upstate New York, where her father, Thomas, now works. Her parents believe they are fighting for her life. They talk with her about ethics, mortality, the responsibility of parents to their children. By early summer, Emily is curling up between them every night before bed, or lying on the couch with her father, watching old movies and talking his ear off.

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In July, Emily's parents let her take off to Santa Fe, where her best friend is living for the summer. It seems to change everything. She waits tables at an Applebee's in a predominantly Latino part of town, leads a blue-collar life, sees harder and more varied lives than she has known before. She returns to college late that August, accepting her parents' offer to take their Subaru Outback, and seems more of an adult, ready to take Kenyon on again with some perspective. She takes a waitressing job at the Pirates' Cove, working nights and serving beer, and eventually starts seeing a therapist. Her friends say she doesn't blabber so much, her cheeks have thinned, her fingers are more shapely, and her toes no longer seem to curl like a little girl's.

Then it's Halloween, the biggest party night of the year, and to show the peace she's come to, Emily decides she's going to be Kenyon College. She takes pictures of all the buildings on campus and makes cardboard models of them, tapes and pins them across her body.

And, underscoring her new confidence, Emily tells friends she finally knows what she wants to do. She's been to a church leadership conference that really set her straight, and she's decided she's going to be an Episcopal minister. The tangles that drove her to want to take her own life seem to be unknotting.

ON MAY 12, 2000, Greg gets into his red Mazda and drives to meet up with his friend Greg Julious, a kid with a felony on his record, barely twenty. Julious lives with his girlfriend, Dana, who's twenty-two and has two kids. McKnight knows Julious because he's been sleeping with Dana's friend Lisa.

But tonight Dana comes home from work to find Julious and McKnight together, and it doesn't feel right--just a sense she has. Julious assures her everything's fine, go do your errands, and she reluctantly goes along with it. When she returns an hour later, both men are gone, but candles are still burning, almost at the end of their wicks. The door's unlocked. It's not like Julious to leave things so unfinished.

So she pages McKnight, and keeps paging him. When he finally calls back, he puts Julious on the phone, who says, We're going to a block party in Columbus, everything's cool.

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But two days later, Julious still hasn't come home. And then McKnight comes around asking Dana if she's seen Julious. He tells her he is leaving Kathy--who is pregnant with their second child--and wants to move in with them. She presses McKnight, who says he hasn't seen Julious since the party. He says he dropped him off in Cincinnati, two hours away. But weren't they going to Columbus, an hour in the completely opposite direction? No, McKnight says, he thinks it was Cincinnati--but we could move in together.

McKnight leaves, and although no one but Dana questions Julious's disappearance--he has no real family, a street kid from Cincinnati--she never sees him again.

Back in Ray, McKnight is trying to explain why a window in his red Mazda is smashed out, the backseat gone. He says someone tried to break into the car in Columbus. Or he locked his keys in the car and had to break in. Or he removed the seat to install a big stereo speaker. Or the kids were spilling milk on the seat and it sta-ank. Only he never put a speaker in the car, and wasn't Kathy breast-feeding Kachina? And wasn't Keenah born a month later? Greg trades in the car, and a Columbus woman is driving it by summer's end.

The following December, police will find Greg Julious's dismembered and charred remains in three places on the property around Greg McKnight's trailer--in the root cellar, in the cistern that was meant to house the septic tank, in the woods. Shortly after that, when a deputy tracks down McKnight's old Mazda, the floor will still be covered in so much of Julious's blood that the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation agent who checks it out won't know at first where to begin taking a sample.

IT'S SUMMERTIME in Gambier, and bees are everywhere. A thin soot of yellow pollen chalks the hoods of cars. On the Kenyon campus there are halter tops and bikini tops among the gothic buildings and spindly conifers. Greg notices it all. He and Kathy have moved to town so she can take care of her mother. And he notices because there's nothing more he can do but watch in this alternate world tucked away up on the hill. It's almost enough, just seeing it, talking to the girls while he works with them at the Pirates' Cove, this little dump of a place they call a restaurant. It's almost enough.

At the Cove, Greg has been single-mindedly after women--asks to sleep in their dorm rooms, grabs their hips from behind, pinches their asses. One waitress and her fiancé work there together, and when just the fiancé's at work, Greg calls her at home, wants to know where she lives so he can come over. When her fiancé confronts him, Greg says, Open your mouth again and you'll wake up dead in a ditch. But Greg's got a sweet smile, a sense of humor as well, and that makes him some friends. One night he jokes with one of the guys in the kitchen, I'm a priest. I'm completely celibate.

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Greg still steals off to Ray sometimes, too, and one night in the beginning of October, he breaks into a neighbor's trailer down there, steals five guns, and as he's speeding back to his trailer plows head-on into an oncoming truck. Unbelievably, the neighbor he stole the guns from happens by while police are cataloging the contents of Greg's car and says, Them's my damn guns. Greg denies knowing anything about them, then tells the sheriff that friends from New York--hoodlums, the kind of guys you don't wanna fuck with--took the guns, not him. He will stick to that story when he's indicted for burglary several weeks later.

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One night back in Gambier around the same time, Greg steps outside the Cove for a smoke with his coworkers. Emily Murray flashes him a friendly smile. They've been working at the Cove for not wholly different reasons: It's the center of social life for of-age Kenyon students. Emily enjoys the work, but she's put in long hours. She's just given her two weeks' notice. She's been missing an early philosophy class, and she doesn't really need the money.

By now Greg and Emily have been working together for a couple of months. He knows some of Emily's friends. He's flirted with the other waitresses, but it's tough to flirt with the girl who smiles at you before you get a line out, the girl who in an instant draws you in and pushes you away. He doesn't know her very well yet, this little red thing with her doe eyes and her smile and her what-are-you-really-thinking stare. No, but what are you really thinking?

IT'S COLD on Thursday night, November 2, and kids amble down to the Pirates' Cove in groups of three, four, five. Mid-semester due dates have mostly come and gone, and probably three quarters of the Kenyon students of age will drop by the Cove tonight.

Just about all of Emily's friends show up tonight, her last at the Cove. They hear her under her breath--Don't go crazy, don't go crazy--and they know that's just Emily, always at the center of attention, always a little dramatic. But there's some truth to it; she's ready to be done with this job. Her friends are throwing a daiquiri party tomorrow night, and she drove this afternoon to Wal-Mart, bought the blender, and put herself together for one last night at the Cove.

At two the crowd's almost totally gone, and it's nearly three when she finally finishes vacuuming the rugs, wiping down tables, and turning chairs atop them. Then it's just her and the manager out front and Greg in the kitchen. Greg punches out at 2:59 A.M., according to the time clock in the back. Then Emily punches out at 3:07. Maybe she takes a look around the place, realizing she'll be back again to drink, but she'll be just a patron then.

She goes out to the concrete portico and Greg's standing there. He wants a ride home. She knows he's always asking for a ride, that he lives in town, that she would have helped out anyone who asked back in Santa Fe that summer. She says to hop in.

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The trip is circuitous at best. They leave the Cove's parking lot and, most likely, roll slowly up Brooklyn Street to Route 308, past the Gund Commons, past the Watson dormitory where Emily lives, and out three miles, where Greg then directs her to follow 13 south through central Ohio. They coast past downtown McDonald's and Pizza Huts, gray streets marking the occasional town between patches of rural state road, sparse farm-vehicle and truck traffic mainly.

It's not clear when Greg pulls the .357 Ruger--immediately after getting in the car? When they get to the edge of town? At what point in the ride does Emily know she's gone too far? Was she driving, crying, yelling? Was Greg driving? Then finally it's Route 93 south, a bleak roller-coaster road describing the severity of the landscape, hills dipping and rising past fields of papery dead corn and dried soy for three dark hours, until the sun braces the horizon. Does she see the string of trailers rising along the side of the embankment as they approach Clark Road? Does she feel the road turn to dirt or feel the pull as they head up that final steep incline?

Emily's car is parked outside Greg's trailer, the trees on the hill bare and spaced like the last hairs on a nearly bald head. It's almost as cold inside the trailer as outside. Trash bags slouch in piles everywhere; a double helix of wires sprout from the ceiling where a light fixture might have been. Thin particleboard cabinets line the two walls of the kitchen. Next to the doorway, a stale bullet hole puckers the wall; the thin metal-and-plastic siding bends outward like the spreading petals of a flower.

And the rest is forever opaque. By the time Vinton County police find her body five weeks from now, it will be too late to determine conclusively if Emily was raped, although she was fully clothed, suggesting she was not.

A trail of blood leads to the room where she'll be found, extending from two large spots near the entrance of the trailer. The angle of the shot will suggest that she was on her knees. No sign of injury will be found on her body save the bullet hole in the top of her head and the exit wound just below her jaw, in the nape of her neck.

The blood trail indicates that Greg rolls her over once before dragging her down the hallway, where he lifts her and wraps her in an afghan rug. Then he leaves her there to the mercy of nature, piled under half a dozen brown garbage bags.

I HAVE SEEN GREGORY McKnight only twice in my life. The most recent time was on a videotape made of his interrogation by an FBI agent and a Knox County sheriff on the night Emily's body was found. The video is difficult to watch.

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Greg sits at a brown table, leaning back and calm, sometimes rubbing the top of his head with his hands, elbows out to the side as if, were he to stop, he would be in position to be cuffed. His head is compact on his broad shoulders, his torso thick and strong, a huge delta. As the officers begin to question him, it seems clear that Greg has no idea that they have found Emily's body. His pager keeps going off and he keeps looking at it, asking if he can make a phone call, but that is the closest to fidgeting he gets.

Then the sheriff slides a copy of Emily's missing poster with her photo onto the table in front of Greg, the tips of the sheriff's fingers leaning into it, his weight bearing down toward Greg. Did he know Emily? At first, Greg answers, Didn't know her. Then, I talked to her, but I really don't hang out. Then a few more similar questions, and then, I'm not trying to say I don't care or anything.

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Finally the investigators reveal they've found Emily's body in his trailer. An officer had gone there to serve Greg a summons following his indictment for the gun burglary and had come upon the Subaru with New York plates.

Greg denies that he's been to his trailer recently: I don't have a vehicle to get down there. His demeanor doesn't change. All the while, the poster with Emily's picture is on the table under his nose. Greg looks down at it twice, when directed to, then never again. He appears totally devoid of emotion, revealing little but not saying much to defend himself, either. His pager keeps going off.

I talk to the prison guards who escort him to the courthouse each day of his trial, and they describe Greg as "institutionalized." They say that if they took him to the bathroom, he would stop at the threshold, wait until they said he could enter before walking, knowing the drill. This strikes me as the way he acted when questioned about Emily's murder--as if he'd been through it before, like he knew how to answer, like he was playing a game to which he knew the rules but not how to win.

It has been more than two years since he has said a substantive word to anyone about the case other than It is what it is, which he told his lawyers when they were ready to plea-bargain for his life. And except for this poem, "The Bastard Speaks," which he wrote while he awaited trial and which got him a stint on suicide watch. His handwriting is measured, neat, almost feminine:

Death before dishonor why not? It's only right considering the past! / How is one suppose to defend against the unknown? the unseen, the unheard? how is one suppose to live day to day when revenge dwells in the hearts of men that call themselves you brother. a secret society can make or break an innocent soul to the point of no fixing. / I fear no more! / if I was a poor man would you risk your life for me? / if I was a leopard would you love me? / if I was a wealthy man would my drug addiction matter? / What does the phrase "I only tell you once either get down with the clique or get found in a ditch" mean to you? / I am a single man now no longer a connection to anybody's "so called riches" "or inheritances" / I wonder how important I will be now to those that seek the unknown which isn't mine? / Death before dishonor is all I know now!

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THE FIRST TIME I saw Greg was at the Pirates' Cove. It was my first visit since I'd graduated. I went back looking for a respite; I'd spent my first truly bad days in New York imagining myself back to a stone bench at a stone table where I'd spent countless hours. I caught up with friends, and we sat around and tried to ignore the fact that Emily Murray was missing, that it was November 11, 2000, and no one had seen her for a week.

As I was leaving the Cove that Saturday night, I went to the register to buy a six-pack. I opened my wallet, and Greg was behind the counter. He was friendly. He saw my New York City MetroCard and said, Hey, man, you ride the train? And I was friendly back, said, Yeah, you from New York? and he said, Queens, man. We smiled at each other, because at Kenyon, that's what you do; you smile back. And now I mull over those words from a man who was then just a week removed from murdering a woman I cared for, less than a month away from his arrest. A man who would ask people at the Cove, Any word about Emily? Or tell the bartender, Dude, I bet she's dead.

I think now of his smile, which brings him too close, only to pull him away like the memory of

a dream after waking. I want to grab him, break him, maim him, wipe that fucking smile off his face. And for all the rage I can some days muster and other days only beg away, nothing I could have done or said would have changed a thing.

In his opening argument at Greg's trial, Vinton County prosecutor Tim Gleeson describes the indisputable evidence against Greg and asks the jury, Start with the possible suspects being everybody on the planet earth. And as you look for that evidence, it will rule out groups of people, one by one. And when you're done, all the way done, there will be one person from the planet earth left [who could have killed Emily Murray]--and that's Gregory B. McKnight.

Oddly, it seems that the image serves us just as well in reverse, starting with the CRIME and working back to see the events that brought these two people from opposite ends of the planet to the Cove that night. That story seems nearly as ineluctable as the logic that indicts him for her murder. Except that it is not a story of reassuring order and revelation.

I sought to look plainly at the murder of Emily Murray, in part to take away some of its awful mystery. But she wasn't my girlfriend, she wasn't my best friend, she wasn't my daughter. Emily's parents, who sat in the courtroom every day of Greg's trial, also were trying to face it squarely. Her father told me there was nothing he wasn't willing to hear, only images he wouldn't see. That's where he drew the line; we set boundaries. But there was something he needed from hearing the details of the murder. The overwhelming fact of Emily's absence would always be there, but now he could at least carry with that loss another truth: the murder as it was. The result of a series of real, knowable, utterable, and mostly mundane occurrences. The way these things probably happen.

Greg's trial lasts nine days. The jury deliberates for seven hours and hands the judge a verdict of guilty for the murder and kidnapping of Emily Murray and the murder and dismemberment of Greg Julious, followed by a recommendation for the death penalty. Before sentencing, Vinton County judge Jeffrey Simmons receives letters from Emily's family asking him to spare Greg's life, as they say Emily would have wished. On October 25, 2002, Judge Simmons--the same judge who married Greg and Kathy in 1998--sentences Greg to death by lethal injection. He is currently on death row at Mansfield state prison.

Since Ohio reinstated the death penalty on October 19, 1981, a dozen death-row inmates have been executed. The average person put to death in Ohio sits for sixteen years awaiting the outcome of appeals. On the night Greg took Emily's life, he was twenty-four years old. If he is executed after that average length of time, he will be forty-two when he dies. Emily Murray was awarded an honorary degree from Kenyon College when her class graduated in May 2002. On February 19, 2003, she would have turned twenty-three.

The following December, police will find Greg Julious's dismembered and charred remains in three places on the property surrounding Greg McKnight's trailer.